Name: 毒物学者だけど質問ある？【PART2】 | Tech Support | WIRED.jp
Uploaded: 2025-03-24T09:30:54.000Z
Duration: 14 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And I'm here today to answer your questions from Twitter.

First up, we have a question from Kooby Lichen.

Well, a poison is a substance that can do damage to any living organism or to the environment.

If you drank six liters of water, that probably could kill you.

That would give you an overdose of caffeine.

Something else that could kill you right on your table.

There's a lot of things that you might not think are poisonous, but in the right dose, they most definitely are.

Both sun poisoning and sunburn are both caused by overexposure to UV rays.

A severe sunburn becomes sun poisoning when it moves from just that red, hot rash to blisters, feeling like you have the flu, dizzy, or nauseous.

Sun poisoning is your body's immune reaction to all of that sun damage.

So what do you do if you have either of those things?

Make sure you drink lots and lots of water.

That sun damage will dehydrate you, and dehydration is the cause of a whole lot of other problems.

Apply cool, not icy cold, compresses on your skin.

Take an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory agent as well.

So if one happened to smash a mercury thermometer and then happened to spend an hour forensically gathering tiny dots of quicksilver from the floor, how would one happen to safely dispose of the evidence?

It is very, very important that you are careful and complete in how you actually clean up this spill.

Mercury can vaporize, get into the air, and you can breathe it.

So you wanna see if you can have your windows open.

I know it's fun to let it play in your hand, but you can't do that anymore.

So wear some gloves, be very careful, use duct tape to kind of pound on the ground to clean it up.

All of those things, those cleaning supplies, everything, put into some kind of giant Ziploc-type bag, and then you're gonna have to wait until you have a hazardous waste collection day and dispose of it properly.

Do not clean up spilled mercury with a vacuum cleaner.

Mercury is very, very dangerous for the environment, and it's also not great for you either.

From Rick Nowak, what is the most poisonous mushroom?

Well, if you really want to know, it's probably the death cap mushroom.

Within six to 12 hours, you are in incredible pain.

Nausea, vomiting, violent chills, muscle contractions, all of these nasty things, and eventually, if the dose was high enough, you end up having liver failure, multiple organ failure, and death.

From Crimson Sexta, I've been trying for so long to explain the difference between venom and poison when it comes to snakes.

The difference really is how that poison is delivered to the person.

A poison is administered or you're exposed to it via breathing or touching it or ingesting it.

Venom, that is also a poison, but it's how you get that poison.

That's more of a sting or a bite, so it's more active.

You get bit by a copperhead snake, that's a venomous attack.

At Wildlife Defense asks, what is Compound 1080?

Compound 1080 is an extremely potent predicide.

So if you've got sheep and goats in your field and you've got a problem with coyotes, well, this is what you would use.

Because Compound 1080 is so potent, they have a special way to administer it to avoid killing broad numbers of animals in your field.

There's a collar that they put around the neck, so it's got a collar with a reservoir of the 1080 right along the neck, so that when the coyote comes along and grabs the neck, it bites into that reservoir and is immediately poisoned and dies.

Lifescapes asks, what does a toxicologist study?

Just like there's different kinds of doctors, there's lots of different kinds of toxicologists.

I am an occupational toxicologist, and my job is to look at all the things that could be in a workplace.

Food toxicologists, for example, they work to make sure our food supply is safe.

I even know a toxicologist that works at a winery.

From Blue Bell Bats, Google search how to detect poison.

I'm gonna need to have a little bit more information.

If the lead singer is Bret Michaels, then I'm sure it is poison.

If it's just bad medicine, sorry, that's Bon Jovi.

If it's party poison, that's My Chemical Romance.

Caitlin Rebecca asks, so is alcohol actually poison or?

Anything can be a poison in the right dose, and alcohol is definitely a poison if you drink too much.

First of all, alcohol can impair your central nervous system, so that can slow your breathing.

A byproduct of alcohol metabolism is the formation of acetaldehyde.

Acetaldehyde is a chemical that really likes to damage parts of your liver.

Long-term, that slow exposure over time to alcohol and its metabolites can result in cirrhosis and other kinds of liver damage, eventually leading to potentially liver cancer.

From LKHuvanju75, mad hatters were mad because of the lead mercury.

Mercury was used to help make the different skins they used for hats help that firm mat really well.

It also toughened up the fibers and made a very high-quality felt that was gonna be used in the hat.

Part of the hat-making process is that you steam the hat that releases all of that mercury into the air, and then they breathed it.

It's because of many of the psychological symptoms that the overexposure to the mercury caused, hallucinations, dizziness, tremors.

You think of mad hatters actually as something being from Victorian times, but actually it wasn't until 1940s that in the United States, the governor of Connecticut banned the use of mercury in hats.

Appypaw asks, how long does poison take to work?

Some poisons can make you sick right after you ingest, breathe, or touch it.

Other poisons, those can take a lifetime to really manifest in its adverse effects.

Something like cyanide, you've seen them eat those poison pills in movies.

That definitely can kill you within a few minutes.

Cyanide is a very toxic chemical, and it is extremely potent.

When you get exposed to cyanide, it quickly enters your cell and stops your cell's ability to actually make energy.

You see the convulsions, you have a heart attack, you have different problems within your heart, and it's all because cyanide is really good about getting in your body and inside those cells where it irreversibly stops all energy production.

Let's take another example, like E. coli contaminated lettuce.

You eat your sandwich, you're happy, and then that bacteria produces a toxin that slowly gets released and absorbed into your gut and into the rest of your body.

So it takes a few days, often, for E. coli to really start to exert its adverse effect.